PETER M. SANDMAN is a risk communication consultant and speaker. Much of his work onrisk communication can be found on his website, www.psandman.com.Comments on this and future columns can be sent topeter@psandman.com and synergist@aiha.org.

Three Ways to Manage Controversies
How to Choose among Conflicting Communication Strategies?

BY PETER M. SANDMAN

Your organization faces a controversy—any kind of controversy. Neighbors are worried that you might do X; employees are angry that you did Y; activists are fighting to keep you from doing Z.
You don’t necessarily have to manage the controversy. It might be small enough or short-lived enough to ignore. If it isn’t doing you all that much damage, you might choose to just go about your business and let it simmer (or rage). This is one controversy-related question an organization always faces: is managing the controversy worth the investment, or is it wiser simply to bulldoze your way through?
In recent decades more and more organizations have decided it was worthwhile to manage their controversies, both because the cost of bulldozing their way through has gone up and because organizations have become more sensitive to that cost.
Inside an organization, employee concerns are likelier to get aired and addressed these days. And externally, it’s all about what many of my mining and petrochemical clients call “Social License to Operate” (SLTO). The SLTO concept reflects their growing awareness that public opposition constitutes a significant threat to their ability to do business.
FOCUS ON SUPPORTERS, NEUTRALS, OR OPPONENTS?
Having decided to devote significant effort to managing a controversy, organizations face a second question: how to divide the effort among three alternative strategies.
You can focus on your supporters: mobilize them; empower them; arouse and sustain them. Turn weak supporters into strong supporters, thus making them more likely to speak up on your behalf in conversations with neighbors or coworkers, more likely to show up at a key hearing when you ask them to, more likely to contribute time or money, and so on. And keep strong supporters strong. Let’s call that first strategy support mobilization.
Or you can focus on neutrals, reaching out to them with your side’s arguments and narrative. We don’t need to invent a label for this second strategy. It has one already: public relations. The essence of PR is appealing (often via the media) to people who are relatively uninterested, uninformed, and uninvolved, trying to convert neutrals into weak supporters.
Finally, you can focus on your opponents, aiming to ameliorate their opposition, to turn strong opponents into weaker, less passionate opponents or weak opponents into neutrals. This goal may lead you to validate the strongest opposition arguments and abandon your side’s weakest arguments; to acknowledge and apologize for your prior misbehaviors and errors; to acknowledge your current problems and let opponents watch you struggle to solve them; to give credit to critics for changes they have forced you to make; and so on.
I have devoted much of my career to this third strategy. I call it outrage management.
THE THREE STRATEGIES ARE IN CONFLICT
Why can’t you just pursue all three strategies at the same time?
To some extent you can. You can certainly search for the optimal compromise. And you should. But you can’t do all three to the max, for several reasons.
For one thing, you have finite and often inadequate SLTO resources to allocate. The three strategies compete for time, budget, and other resources.
Even more problematically, the three strategies are likely to compete politically within an organization. This is largely because they are in different hands. One client I worked with recently was pretty typical in this way:

The lobbyists and other government relations people wanted everybody to focus on support mobilization, in order to demonstrate to politicians and bureaucrats that the proposed project had widespread and passionate support.

The communications people were much more interested in PR. They wanted to generate lots of pro-project media clips that would sell the project to marginally interested neutrals. (This would also please top corporate management, which tended to monitor media coverage as a stand-in for the controversy itself).

And the people responsible for on-the-ground local community relations were struggling to calm the controversy, to ameliorate opposition via outrage management.

What happens when goals and strategies for managing a controversy diverge within an organization? Sometimes the different departments work separately at cross-purposes, each in its own silo. Sometimes they fight—arguing explicitly about which strategy to pursue or more subtly working to undermine each other’s efforts. And sometimes senior management adjudicates their differences, forcing everyone to row in the same direction.
Outrage management is least likely to win these internal battles, because it is the most counterintuitive of the three strategies. When organizations face controversy, mobilizing supporters and winning over neutrals make intuitive sense. Being conciliatory with opponents, on the other hand, is challenging to most organizational cultures. For all sorts of reasons—ego and outrage paramount among them—organizations under attack want to fight back instead.
FINDING COMPROMISES
Even without internal battles, allocating resources among the three strategies is hard.
The optimal allocation depends on the situation. In an election campaign, for example, the key strategy is usually public relations. People who don’t know much or care much comprise the majority of voters, and you want them to vote for you. Support mobilization is also important, because you need money and labor, and only your most passionate supporters are likely to contribute or volunteer. Outrage management matters least. Opponents who hate you less than before are still going to vote against you.
In a regulatory controversy, the priorities may be very different. Often the smaller and less passionate the public controversy is, the likelier you are to get your permit. So reducing the number of passionate opponents will help more than increasing the number of passionate supporters. You want fewer people at the hearing, less polarization. Focusing on supporters will make the controversy hotter. Focusing on neutrals will make it bigger. Focusing on opponents will make it cooler and smaller, and is thus the top priority for this sort of controversy.
Outrage management is also likeliest to matter most in small controversies inside an organization. Suppose a handful of employees are upset about some new safety procedure you’ve just instituted. Another handful think the first bunch are being stupid, and most of the work force doesn’t even know the issue has arisen. It’s pretty obvious that you should spend most of your effort trying to calm the few employees who are upset, not rallying your supporters against them or trying to attract new allies among the oblivious majority.

Editor's note: California followed suit in September, announcing its intention to list glyphosate as a carcinogen under Proposition 65.

Opposition to the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was part of my motivation to move from chemistry to toxicology, and the insecticide parathion was part of my post-doctoral project. And I claim expertise (or at least experience) in this process by serving on two IARC working groups, and on National Toxicology Program (NTP) peer review groups for bioassay reports, the criteria for evaluating those bioassay reports, and the Report on Carcinogens (ROC).

- Frank Mirer

IARC Monographs Volumes 112 and 113 address insecticides and herbicides. They classify lindane as known to be carcinogenic to humans (Group 1); DDT, malathion, and diazinphos as probably carcinogenic (Group 2A); and 2,4-D, tetrachlorvinphos and parathion as possibly carcinogenic (Group 2B). Although few IHs work in agriculture, we are likely to get questions about pesticide use in homes and, regarding glyphosate, on our lawns.